We are making smart use of available apps and tool: Dhirendra Mahyavanshi

Dhirendra Mahyavanshi, Co-Founder, Turtlemint

Set up in 2015, Turtlemint offers insurance products for vehicles, life, and health, and works towards educating customers and helping them research across all segments of insurance. The company, which claims it has an advisor network of over 65,000 and a customer base of 500,000 across 800 cities in India, had raised USD 25 million in Series B funding last year. In an interaction with Voice&Data, its co-founder Dhirendra Mahyavanshi talks about the communication technologies and strategies that are keeping Turtlemint up and running during the COVID-19 pandemic.

V&D: Technology is the only way out during the lockdown. What steps have you taken to ensure business continuity at Turtlemint?

Dhirendra Mahyavanshi: We have given our 1,100+ employees the facility to work from home (WFH). We have equipped all our employees with desktop/laptops, data connectivity and wi-fi facility for uninterrupted internet connection.

For us, the safety of our employees, digital partners (PoSPs) and their clients is of utmost importance and we have asked our sales team to avoid holding any business meeting with their prospects during this period. Our other teams from the product, technology, human resources, operations, marketing, and other support functions are trying their best to deliver in these difficult times.

V&D: Coordination and cooperation between teams become a major challenge for remote workers. What tools are you using to enable collaboration for employees working from home?

Dhirendra Mahyavanshi: Being an online insurance marketplace company, technology has always been a part of our DNA. We are using tools like Google Meet (earlier called Hangouts) and Zoom calls for video calls and virtual meetings. Our engineering and product teams have been using Slack quite efficiently and they continue to do so. We are using Google products like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google slides for any collaborative work.

V&D: What are the teleconferencing and video-conferencing tools that you are using for internal and external meetings during the lockdown?

Dhirendra Mahyavanshi: We are using Google Meet for video-conference. However, if a large number of people have to join the meeting, we use the Zoom call. Our team invests a lot of time in developing educational content and training the internal teams, as well as our Digital Partners. To facilitate this we use Zoom’s live video-conference.

V&D: What about customer service? How are you ensuring that it is not impacted due to the current situation?

Dhirendra Mahyavanshi: We are making smart use of available apps and tools like the Google Duo and WhatsApp for video interaction with our PoSPs and Anydesk to help our partners, and internal teams to resolve any queries or issues. Since our business is driven by mobile application most of our processes like sharing quotes of insurance policies, payments, and uploading documents are online and paperless. That’s the advantage our partners and their clients get working with us.

V&D: Are you facing any technology and business challenges?

Dhirendra Mahyavanshi: Yes, with the mobility of our sales team getting affected, we expect an impact on our business. This holds true for any organization globally and India is no exception. With teams scattered in different locations, we are expecting that the lockdown will impact our TAT and the deadlines of various projects that we had set for ourselves.